Teenager Inspired To Survive

Chance Encounter Gives Ailing Teen Courage To Survive

Eddie DeLeon stood at the window of his 11th-floor room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center looking out across the East River toward Queens, thinking about life.

Thoughts of getting out, of being done with cancer, of making it in music tumbled round in his mind as he watched the steady stream of traffic to and from Manhattan crossing the cold, gray steel of the Queensboro Bridge.

"I wanted to be out there," said Eddie, recalling that day in March, one of many that the 19-year-old from Cromwell stood at the glass wondering why he was in a hospital fighting cancer instead of out on the streets conquering the world.

While at Sloan-Kettering, Eddie could dream about the future, but he knew that he might not live it. A deadly form of cancer had spread across his abdomen, and it stood between him and all he wanted to be.

Stalked by death from within, Eddie lived with fear and uncertainty, languishing between anger and despair, until the day a little girl with leukemia gave him the courage to live.

Just over a year ago, Eddie felt a sharp pain in one of his testicles, which had become swollen and hard. Knowing little about his own body, he dismissed the discomfort as a growing pain.

But when it worsened, he reluctantly and with embarrassment told his father, Anastacio, who took him immediately to a doctor.

Eddie was diagnosed as having an uncommon form of germ-cell cancer.

Dr. Robert J. Motzer, an oncologist in New York who would treat Eddie, said the disease afflicts about 5,000 men between the ages of 15 and 35 in the United States yearly.

On the way home from the doctor's office the day they learned how sick Eddie was, he and his father cried.

Last fall, after months of treatments, Eddie's hair had fallen out and his body ached from the surgery. He did his best to disguise it, but he began sliding into a depression.

"I could really see the change in him," said Eddie's longtime friend, Marco Genovese of Middletown. "He was so unhappy. He was miserable."

Their friendship had been forged in junior high school during Spanish class. Marco said he struggled with the language, but Eddie, because of his Hispanic roots, could speak it well. Eddie enjoyed whispering wrong answers to Marco during class and watching the teacher's reaction as Marco mimicked the words.

"I almost flunked listening to him," Marco said. "He was always playing jokes on me."

Their friendship grew, but the joking all but stopped last fall.

"He would never really cry," said Marco, 20. "He wasn't like that. ... He just kept it inside."

Eddie told his friends that the numerous rounds of chemotherapy and surgery at Middlesex Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston had cured him.

Marco wanted to believe it. Eddie, he said, was like his brother.

But Eddie wasn't well. He'd been lying to his family, to Marco, to his teachers. He'd been lying to himself.

But his tower of denial began to crumble. Though a senior at Cromwell High School, he had stopped going to class. He also missed two appointments for additional treatments at the cancer center in New York.

The tower fell in on him in January with a telephone call from Dr. James E. Brown, an oncologist at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown. Brown had called the high school looking for Eddie, but was told Eddie had stopped going to school.

There was no sugar coating on what Brown had to tell Eddie: He would be dead in six months without stronger doses of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants.

Brown told Mary Anne Wysocki, a guidance counselor at the school who had worked with Eddie, that the student must go to New York for treatment. He feared Eddie had given up on life.

Wysocki didn't wait for the doctor to track down Eddie. She got in her car and drove to Eddie's house on Main Street, where he lives with his father and younger sister, Madeleine.

As she pulled into the driveway, she could hear the music blaring from the stereo in Eddie's room and the sound of breaking glass.

The doctor's call had arrived before she had.

"He had his music turned up so it was blasting," Wysocki said. "He was angry. He was screaming and throwing things. I was scared he was going to hurt himself."

Wysocki went in the house, sat down and waited for the storm to pass.

Afterward, "he admitted he was scared," Wysocki said. "But he didn't want to let this get the best of him."

Eddie spent most of January in Sloan-Kettering, undergoing cycles of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants. He had agreed to have the treatment but in his heart he really didn't know whether he would or why he should live.